after five days, it's finally ready: split, ortholinear layout, robin choc switches and cool special low profile keycaps 😎

story as a spoiler, bc it's rather long, only if you have nothing to do lol

<details>

i've been eyeing this keyboard for a couple of years, pcbs were semi-available, but the cases, especially the cool metal ones were pretty much never available, always out of stock, or in a group buy that i always missed

so when I finally got a chance to buy one, i did so immediately

sadly the seller was in the us, so of course the shipping to europe was like 60 dollars, plus import tax, and this isn't to me, this is to a friend in europe (bc of course they don't ship to russia), who later brought it to me during a visit

once unpacked and ready to solder (the keyboard wasn't assembled, you have to do it yourself), i suddenly realized that the main controller arrived with a set of pins to be permanently soldered to the pcb, which is suboptimal, as desoldering the controllers

"Essentially the greater the deviation from Qwerty, the greater the potential benefits."

A problem with Keyhero

I've been using Keyhero for some time now. It looks ok, and it's nice to be able to operate (skip quotes, start new ones) without using your mouse. And the quotes can be interesting.

At some point I noticed that my typing speed progress basically plateaued. Then I noticed that Keyhero either has a really weird algorithm calculating typing speeds, or is simply misreporting them.

As you can see in the screenshot, the average speed is stated as 111 wpm, which is a speed that I literally never went below! Looking at the graph you can see that the speed is more likely 140 or 150 wpm.

I was primarily using Keyhero without an account, but then I noticed that every time you reopen Keyhero, it sets the average speed by default as 35 wpm (what?). Maybe the per-game average is somehow tied to the overall average speed (for whatever reason) I thought, maybe that was the issue?

But then I registered an account, and got my average speed from the initial 35 wpm

I use a German keyboard but switched to the QWERTY layout to input programming symbols more easily. I still want to be able to type German umlauts, though. My keyboard also has a alt gr key that I want to put to use. So I created the file ~/.xkb/symbols/us-custom with the following contents:

 undefined

    
default partial alphanumeric_keys
xkb_symbols "basic" {
    // Umlauts (ä, ö, ü) and €
    include "us(de_se_fi)"

    name[Group1] = "US layout plus some Unicode symbols using altgr combinations";
    // <AC06> means: middle row, 6th key on the board from the left

    // Unicode arrows (←, ↓, ↑, →)
    key <AC06> { [ h, H, U2190 ] };
    key <AC07> { [ j, J, U2193 ] };
    key <AC08> { [ k, K, U2191 ] };
    key <AC09> { [ l, L, U2192 ] };

    // Typographic punctuation
    key <AE11> { [      minus, underscore,   endash,       emdash ] };
    key <AB09> { [     period,    greater, ellipsis               ] };
    key <AB10> { [      slash,   question, division, questiondown ] };
    key <AE08> { [          8,   asterisk,       
  

This video addresses:

• Are tiny keyboards useful?
• What about special characters in languages other than English?
• How do you access numbers and function keys on a 40% keyboard?
• Comparison of sound intensity of different switches